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Networks that Cannot Match: Managing Crusade and Trade in 15th- Century Rhodes

  • Georg Christ

Hospitaller Rhodes was a networked polity, territorially based on a string of islands in the Dodecanes. To survive, it needed to generate resources and channel them to the islands. To that end, it harnessed the energy of three networks: the fundraising power of the chivalric-monastic Hospitaller establishments across Latin Europe, the revenues generated by transregional trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the plunder skimmed off the predatory-commercial system of crusading piracy. Yet these three networks were officially at odds with one another if not utterly incompatible. It will be argued that Hospitaller Rhodes managed to combine them all by prioritizing the first, crusading, and the third, commercial, while significantly curtailing the second, piracy. While the Order chiefly achieved this by keeping the networks separate, it could not prevent their clashing in the harbour of the city of Rhodes. The Order mitigated this clash by deploying frontispiece architecture to divert travellers’ and, through the respective propagandistic writing and artwork, the public’s view away from trade and piracy and draw attention instead toward the harbour of Rhodes as the last bastion of Christianity, as crusade in action.

  • Keywords:
  • Late Middle Ages,
  • Rhodes,
  • Hospitallers,
  • frontispiece architecture,
  • crusade,
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Georg Christ

University of Manchester, United Kingdom - ORCID: 0000-0003-1833-5960

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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Networks that Cannot Match: Managing Crusade and Trade in 15th- Century Rhodes

Authors

Georg Christ

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1117-8.07

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Diplomatic Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean

Book Subtitle

Individuals, Groups, and Interactions

Editors

Isabella Lazzarini, Roser Salicrú i Lluch

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

208

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1117-8

ISBN Print

979-12-215-1115-4

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979-12-215-1117-8

eISBN (xml)

979-12-215-1120-8

Series Title

Reti Medievali E-Book

Series ISSN

2704-6362

Series E-ISSN

2704-6079

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